Central Puget Sound Region Open Space Assessment Tool (OSAT)

Overview

The Open Space Assessment Tool (OSAT) is a collaborative effort to integrate and elevate the many activities underway to conserve and enhance the ecological, economic, recreational, and aesthetic vitality of the Central Puget Sound region. Click here to learn more.

This prototype mapping portal is an effort to baseline the region’s vast array of critical open space services and benefits to inform conservation, enhancement and protection priorities in the region. Driven by an ecosystem services approach and with a lens to fully account for the full spectrum of open space benefits, the ROSS is working to baseline 16 key open space services . Many of these services can be quantitatively mapped and are to be part of this GIS baselining effort.

OSAT attempts to understand key regional challenges and their intersection with open space planning: Climate Change, Biodiversity, Human Health, Social Equity and Economic Development. The intention is to aggregate the region’s most strategic data available to date to understand opportunities and tradeoffs in regional decision-making across these challenges, communities and the landscape.

This prototype portal currently only represents a small portion of these services and regional challenges (a portion of Air, Water, Land Cover conditions and Demographics, and a first attempt at aggregating Climate Change data). Other services and regional challenges are marked as placeholders. This prototype was designed to better identify best metrics to support ROSS stakeholders and to understand and explore the reporting and querying tools the portal offers. Click here to learn more about the data metrics development approach adopted. Vetting and refinement of this prototype is underway for Spring 2015 with a hope to build it out more completely with additional funding as the ROSS develops. To provide feedback, please send an e-mail to info@openspacepugetsound.org.